‘Maria’ Venice Film Festival Review: Pablo Larraín Ends His Iconic Women Trilogy on a Low Note

In advanced press for Maria, director Pablo Larraín positioned his Angelina Jolie-starring Marie Callas biopic as the final installment of a trilogy about legendary 20^th-century women. In style and subject, this glimpse into the final week of the legendary prima donna of the opera does bear similarities to 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, the director’s other iconoclastic works of portraiture. But to the film’s detriment, Larraín tries to force fit the square peg of his subject into the round hole of his larger narrative reclamation project.

There’s a key biographical detail that should have raised flags early on for Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight. Unlike Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, Callas’ cultural power did not derive from any association with her husband. The world’s greatest opera singer, as she came to be known at mid-century, got to set the narrative about the virtuosic talents she possessed on her own terms. The press did not necessarily treat her any more fairly as a result, of course, but Callas’ coverage did derive from her abilities rather than just her appearance.

Accordingly, Maria never possesses the same urgency of perspective because her story does not require the same effort of excavation from underneath misogynistic media messages. “Time does heal a lot of things,” the real Callas observed later in her life when out of favor with the public, “and I’m quite sure time will prove what I am.” Larraín attempts such substantiation by favoring the presentation of Callas’ subjective truth over an objective recounting of events in her life. (A little more of the latter might have been in order if for no other reason than education for a viewing public far less familiar with the opera star.)

Maria, like Jackie and Spencer, shows the audience the movie playing in the subject’s head rather than the one visible to the outside world. As a performer by choice and not merely by chance of marriage, she internalizes the divide between person (Maria) and persona (La Callas) at a cellular level. “The stage is in my mind,” Jolie’s Callas explains, and Larraín literalizes this context collapse by editing freely between reverie and reality. Any space in her dwelling place of Paris, from a large public plaza to her home kitchen, becomes a potential venue for a burst of ecstatic musicality.

These expressionistic sequences represent Larraín’s greatest contribution to the stodgy biopic genre, and they receive vivid realization in Maria from cinematographer Ed Lachman’s dynamic, adaptive camerawork. But their imaginative power is less potent when they must exist in conversation with a performance like the subdued one Jolie gives here. It’s a far more mannered turn than those delivered by Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart, both of whose borderline campy work helped build an expansive permission structure for Larraín to take wilder formalist swings.

The Callas of Maria is necessarily vulnerable, but she’s also too fragile to work within this grandiloquent framework. Jolie is demure when Larraín needs her to be daring. Some of this effect boils down to the nature of the figure herself, a woman who understood the need to shape her life into a melodramatic spectacle befitting the ones she headlined herself. Callas commits so deeply to a three-act structure to undergird her life that she hallucinates a documentary crew headed by Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Mandrax (also the name of her sedative of choice) to help her shape the final chapter of her career. The narrative device functions as a blunt delivery instrument of thematic material for a film that otherwise wants to operate in an abstract, ethereal realm.

Callas isn’t just dreaming up her comeback tour, however. She’s actively training to grace the world’s great opera halls again and disprove her detractors. The scenes are, by necessity, the film’s most literal as they must demonstrate Callas’ preternatural skill. Her voice, a composite of the star and the subject mixed in post-production, ultimately looks unconvincing when emanating from Jolie’s mouth. Without additional background to explain the singer’s resistance and resilience, this incarnation of Callas amounts to little more than gesturalism and gentility.

“If one tries to listen to me,” the true Maria Callas once noted, “one will find all of myself in there.” The greatest shortcoming of Maria is that Larraín, Knight, or even Jolie might have heard their subject without truly listening to her. The film gives voice to her inner world yet can only envision that personal expression within a ready-made template of a victimized woman taking agency over her story. Their shallow dive into a deep well of “her-story” shortchanges Callas by shoehorning her complex thoughts about artistry and life into obvious psychobabble.

Netflix acquired Maria at the Venice Film Festival and will release the film later in 2024.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.